"When Will I Feel Better?" story by Lou Dub

Imagine you are trapped on an island with fresh water, a nice climate, good soil, friendly natives, lots of vegetables, fish and meat, every kind of fruit except apples.

You miss your home, you wish you could return but there is no way off the island. The land you came from was full of apple orchards, apples grew everywhere, green granny smiths, and big rosy sweet red ones, venerable old trees and young saplings all producing apples. Thinking about home you begin to yearn for an apple. One day a crate is washed ashore, it is marked "apples". Excitedly you rip open the crate and to your dissappointment it is full of packets of apple seeds. When you get over your dissappointment, you finally decide to plant the seeds. Some of the seeds die immediatly, others last a few days but then they wither in the hot sun. One or two make it to a couple of weeks but they too die, because you dont know how to look after them.

With the last seed, you know that this is your last chance, you might never get to eat an apple again if you can't get this to grow. So you go to the island library and get a book on how to grow apples, you take advice from the elders who remember a time when apples were grown in the past.

You plant the seeds and wait. After a week a shoot appears. You give it a little water and shade it from the tropical sun. Within two weeks it has grown about six inches, you are delighted with the progress but still yearn for the day when it will produce an apple. In a month, with help from the Island's excellent climate, advice from the elders and your careful watering and weeding and monitoring it has grown to a height of 2 feet tall and is beginning to develop a bark and toughen up a bit. The taller it grows the more you yearn for an apple but you know it is going to take a long time before it produces one. You become obsessed with the little tree constantly watching and minding it and it responds to your care and attention. At the two month mark, you want that apple so badly you can almost taste it. In time it becomes a routine for you to look after your tree. You just like the way it looks and the shade it casts for you to sit under. You like the colour of the leaves in the fall and its stark branches in the winter. Its bark is so tough that its immune from the animals that tried to gnaw on it when it was young. By now you have given up on it ever producing an apple, you don't even want one any more, you just like it for what it is, you can hardly remember when you planted it.
One day when you are on the porch, you look up into your precious tree and you see bunches and bunches of little apple buds. Soon the tree is groaning with the weight of sweet delicous apples. You bite into one of those juicy apples and remember why you planted the tree, you remember your home and its almost as if you were there.